


Pain, love and everything inbetween

by Pearlislove



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Little Scorpion & the wolf, Self-Harm, episode 2x07, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 06:26:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8360878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pearlislove/pseuds/Pearlislove
Summary: We all have diffrent ways to cope with ourselves and the world around us. Some are good and healthy, some are not. Vanessa's usually aren't, but she doesn't see it as an issue.
At least not until Ethan finds out.
Ethan definatly sees it as an issue
TRIGGER WARNING: graphic depiction of self-harm





	

**Author's Note:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: Graphic depiction of self-harm, cutting and blood
> 
> Takes place during Season 2 Episode 7: Little Scorpion, one or a few days after Vanessa kill a man.

She wait until Ethan’s gone out for another one of his nightly ‘walks’ that she knows most certainly isn’t normal walks.

As soon as he’s out the door, as usual telling her to lock it up tight, she finally dare let herself give in to the urges. They are loud like screeching in her head and the only difference between them and the devil’s calls is that she knows to ignore these when she can't give in.

Her stubborn will not to share this particular problem with anyone, and the fact that she hated any kind of attention, good or bad,was the only thing that had kept Ethan from finding and her from doing it in plain sight, several times a day.

With fast, almost hurried steps she walks over to the locked drawer of the table upon which her basket with drying herbs rest. Feverish excitement rise within her as she think of what's to come, opening the drawer and picking up the only item inside.

Tonight was going to be a much more bearable night than the nights before.

The only item stored with in the locked drawer is a sharp blade. Once upon a time it had been a kitchen knife, but now it is just a blade without a handle, absolutely sharp and dangerously inviting as she looked it over in the dim light of the small fire.

Tightly gripping the part of the blade which used to connect it to the handle, Vanessa sit down on the couch and hold out her arm, passing the blade through the air above it as if trying to figure out where to begin her horrible deed.

Though they're barely visible against her pale skin, Vanessa can clearly see every single one of the silver lines grazing her arm, wrist and hand. She’s long since memorized all their positions so that she always knows where to find them, should she want to do the deed, but avoiding the shame of creating an entirely new mark.

Sometime long ago she had somehow convinced herself the deed wasn’t as bad if you didn’t start brand new on an untouched piece of skin, but rather surrendered to make use of one of the marks already there.

Not that she thinks what she does is a bad thing, either way.

Cross with herself for reflecting on everything for so long rather than just getting started, she quickly bring the blade down on the thickest silver line, which has grown so big by now that she can almost feel it with her fingers. It's the same one she always start with.

The place from where the first drops of blood hit the floor.

It's a clean job, and she quickly move on, putting in two more cuts above it with surgical precision. 

She can feel that they are shallow, the three cuts only radiating a tiny, pulsing pain signal to her brain, but she is convinced they are bleeding all the same.

She could imagine it leaking red liquid from the tiny openings in her pale skin, it's intrusive colour staining the wooden floor beneath her outstretched arm.

She’s not looking, though. She’s closed her eyes, savouring the slight sting of pain from the newly opened cuts. It's as amazing as she rember it to be from every time she's done it before, and so much better than any herbal remedy she could ever make.

She was sure she was finally going to sleep soundly tonight, right after she patched up the arm.

She wished she could leave the cuts open and exposed, raw and red and uncovered to show how unashamed she was, but her brain scream at her that she simply can't, because people will notice. It’s too much of a risk, and it just goes to prove that she is ashamed of what she does after all.

“Vanessa! What are you doing?!” Ethan’s screaming reach her ears, breaking the silent peace that had been surrounding Vanessa and making her eyes flutter open, wanting to look at him.

He's panting, tired and sweating and absolutely terrified with his dark eyes big as sorcerers. “You’re bleeding!” He screech, equally scared and repulsed, and she can almost physically touch the fear in his voice. 

The sound of his voice almost scare her, too.

For a brief moment, she dare to look down at her arm, and barely register her own unmasked surprise at the sight that meet her eyes.

There’s a lot more than the three cuts she remembered making, some of them in new places and some in old, and she guess that she must have gotten so caught up in enjoying the pain of it all that she continued. Though she can tell they’re probably rather shallow, they are still bleeding substantially, covering her hand and arm is the velvet liquid which had also gathered in a puddle on the floor.

Suddenly Ethan’s behaviour was a lot more justified.

It's not bad, cutting never was, but it's not exactly good, either. Especially not the situation it had gotten her into. Ethan hadn’t been meant to know, after all, and now it was all out there.

The blood and the blade in her hand spoke a language clear enough for anyone to understand, and it ached inside Vanessa's heart at the thought that he’d be forced to deal with this part of her too.

“Ethan, calm down, it's not…” Vanessa stop herself half-way through the sentence, recognise the lie that was about the pass her lips. It's exactly what it looked like. Her, opening up the skin of her arm, hand and wrist in an attempt to cancel out some of her emotional pain with physical one.

She had forgotten some people saw that as a bad thing.

Suddenly, she is feeling weak and dizzy and just a little sick, her body swaying in her seat and immediately alarming Ethan, who was still frozen at the door. Before she knows what's happening, the blade she’d been gripping falls to the floor, landing in the middle of the growing puddle of blood and finally snapping Ethan out of his daze.

“Shit...fuck...Vanessa!” He is trying to say something, but doesn't look like he knows what to say, and instead he just scream her name. “Just wait there! I’ll get some water and bandages and we’ll...we’ll fix this!” 

She is feeling seriously dizzy right now, considering if maybe tonight she took it just a little too far, and is still trying to form a replay of her own by the time he get back with the bandages and the water.

His arms wrap around her waist, carefully guide her body down into to lying position before grabbing her massacred arm and starting to clean it, exposing the cuts, which shows how much out of control she was. Most of them are uneven and ragged and nothing like the ones she usually make, ugly even in Vanessa’s world. When Ethan starts to clean the cuts themselves, they sting with pain that she feel unable to enjoy and she frown hard.

“Sorry, but ah I gotta clean ‘em.” He is apologising to her in that Southern accent of his that he always tried to hide, not because she deserved any kind of apology, but because he could never stand any of her facial expressions that weren’t the happy ones. She wants to tell him don't be, but she is barely present enough to realise that he's talking at all, and no words pass her lips.

Instead, there's a thick silence growing between them that she doesn't dare to break.

“Vanessa. Are you listening?” He is fastening the bandage, and the sudden jolt of pain kick her back into full consciousness before she knows what's happening.

“Yes. I'm listening Ethan.” The sentence grows to long, and it's barely she can get her raspy voice to cooperate long enough to get all the words out of her mouth.

Ethan is frowning, his brows furrowed and his lips are drawn into a straight line. She always loved how his frown could never get deeper than that disapproving line, but not now. Not when she can so very clearly tell that he is cross with her. Angry, even. Even more so than when she killed a man.

Back then he worried for her soul, for her heart and for her existence as her, but now he has finally realised what he wouldn’t believe her when she told him then: That her soul and her heart and her had already been lost long ago.

He had every right to be angry with her, she knows that, but oh how she hates it when he won't even look at her, much less talk to her.

She's still waiting for him to say something more, to say whatever he wanted her to listen to, but he is not. He’s dragging out the silence instead and she's wondering if he's ever going to tell her another word, or if he's going to get on his way back to London first thing in the morning, leaving her all alone.

Maybe if he did she could finally bring herself to end it all.

“I’m sorry Ethan.” She manage to push out the words from between her lips before the tears overwhelm her, desperate sobs stocking in her throat and showers of warm water rushing down her cheeks, burning like holy water on a devil. Putting tears on her skin is like putting holy water on the devil's cheeks. “Please don't leave.”

It’s selfish of her to ask him to stay, even after everything she put him through, even after forcing him to promise not to go once earlier, and in her mind those words leaving her lips are just another reason among thousands as to why it would be be better for everyone if she had the courage to end it all.

But she can't, and maybe, that's why she want him to stay. Because she know that if he leaves, her final defence falls, and she will most certainly be dead before the next day can begin.

“Vanessa, I will never leave. Ever. Do you hear me? I’ll always be here to make sure you are safe, to make sure your life lead you somewhere safe. And even if we can't find heaven, I’ll walk through hell with you.” His voice is firm, determined, and his big, calloused hands are carefully cupping her delicate, bony face, thumbs stroking the almost translucent skin on her hollow cheeks. When their eyes look up and meet, there's tears and pain in both of them, and she's ashamed to see, that she is the first one to look away. “I don’t want to ever see you do this again. If you need an outlet, come to me, and we can talk about everything that is wrong instead.”

He is pulling her practically limb body closer, and eventually she ends up sitting on the floor beside him, her back against the sofa and her body safely snuggled in his arms. 

Vanessa has never really known what it's supposed to be like to be loved. She has never experienced feeling the way she does in Ethan’s arms.

The only time in her entire life that she came even close to feeling this loved, was the one time when she was very little and she and Mina were allowed to live in the same room in Mina’s house for a while, because they had both gotten the same disease. They had spent the majority the time sleeping in Mina’s bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, and the moment the doctors declared her cured she had to move back to her own room in her own house, but it was still the best she had to compare to.

“I love you Vanessa.” It is weak, a bare whisper in the dead of the night when she’s almost fallen asleep, but she hear it. And though both of them pretended like it was never said when they woke up the next morning, Vanessa knew what she’d heard, she carried it with her in her heart.

Her one reason to live against thousands of reasons not to.

Ethan loved her


End file.
